It will be seen, therefore, that this west front is planned on the most regular lines and the most ambitious scale. True, some French façades are loftier, as at Amiens for instance, but, as Professor Freeman has pointed out, the effect aimed at at York is one of breadth rather than of height, and it is an advantage that the front is not too high for the towers to rise some way above it. It is also richly decorated and well proportioned in the mass, and yet nearly every one, on first seeing it, must be struck by its curious ineffectiveness when its height and breadth, its regular outline, and profusion of ornament are considered. To tell the truth, the English architects have here endeavoured to rival the French on their own ground, and have not succeeded. The English cathedral, as has been said, was not usually planned on such lines as to make a sumptuous façade possible. Throughout the whole course of English Gothic architecture, the treatment of the west end is curiously hesitating and arbitrary. Sometimes it is altogether unambitious, as at Winchester and Norwich; sometimes boldly illogical, as at Lincoln or Peterborough; and at Salisbury, where everything else is beautiful, it is altogether unsatisfactory. In all these cases circumstances were against the architect, but at York there was every opportunity for a great architectural triumph. Yet the designer was not able to throw off his English timidity, to forget the small English features to which he was used, and to conceive his front as a gigantic whole.
To begin with, he made his west window so large that every other important feature of the central division of the front had to be sacrificed to make room for it. In the great French façades the customary circular window leaves ample space for vast porches below it. These are pushed forward to a level with the great flanking buttresses, so that the actual wall of the church above it appears to be recessed. As the side porches fronting the aisles are on the same level with the main porch, the bottom part of the front is bound together, and the divisions of nave and aisle, emphasised above by the prominent buttresses, are minimised below. This arrangement gives at once unity and variety to the whole design. The towers do not appear to be external additions rising from the ground, but an integral part, the very crown and flower, in fact, of the whole design.
At York the central window is so large that it leaves but little room below it for the porch. This porch, though exquisite in itself, is not pushed forward, but flat with the wall, and appears a mere hole cut in the surface. It has necessarily no connection with the entrances to the aisles; and the finest feature of the great French façades is wanting. But the size of the west window has other disastrous effects. It would have been difficult, almost impossible, to assimilate an opening so large, and of such an elaborate pattern, to the rest of the design, and hardly an effort even has been made to do so. It appears, therefore, like the porches, to have been cut bodily out of the front without regard for the rest of the plan, and its acute arch harmonises badly with the gable above it. No doubt the designer saw the fault; he placed an acute ornamental gable above the window, rising to the top of the front, and he covered the actual gable of the roof with flamboyant tracery of the same character as that on the window; but, by so doing, he merely weakened the contrast between tracery and bare spaces of masonry so necessary to every great design.
The weakness of the central division is not made up for by any excellence in the towers. These, though fine on their lower storeys, are strangely feeble above. They are, in fact, the worst part of the minster, and have been condemned by all critics, from Mr Ruskin downwards. In most towers of this kind there are two windows above and a single one below. At York the three storeys of single windows give the design an air of monotony and weakness. Further, the highest window is not only far too large, but is placed too low. Like the great west window, it appears to have been cut out of the wall. It is also peculiarly unfortunate that the buttresses should die into the wall below the pinnacles. Where a tower is buttressed, it is a natural and logical device to make the pinnacles a continuation of the buttresses. Here both pinnacles and buttresses, unusually prominent and elaborate, do not seem to be an integral part of the design. They have been called a kind of architectural confectionery, and the criticism is just. The fact that the battlements and pinnacles project a few inches over the walls of the towers, only adds to the air of weakness and instability of the whole. Nowhere else surely has a Gothic architect approached so closely to the ideals of his "churchwarden" imitators of the beginning of this century.
But these faults, though serious enough, do not include everything that can be said against the west front of the minster. Gothic churches have often been noble and triumphant works of art in spite of errors almost as grave. Unfortunately the west front suffers from a tendency first beginning to show itself in the middle of the fourteenth century, which afterwards became the most serious drawback of the whole Perpendicular style. It is not only because the porches do not project that it appears flat and thin. The west front of Notre Dame at Paris has no projecting porches, yet the alternations of bare spaces of wall and of rich and deep masses of carving, the strong horizontal lines, and the deep-set windows, give it a boldness and strength altogether wanting at York. Like all Norman and earlier Gothic work, it has this great merit, often most strongly felt by people who are quite unable to explain it, that the design seems to emphasise, and to be dictated by, the materials in which it is carried out. The Norman architect never forgot for a moment—he was not skilful enough to forget—that he was building with stone. So he did not conceive of his west front as a flat space to be ornamented, but as a wall to be built, and naturally his ornament followed and emphasised the main lines of his building. His single pillars, with their heavy capitals, bore witness that they were made of great stones piled one on the top of the other; his simple windows were merely openings in the wall to let in light.
But as masons grew more skilful, and designers more sophisticated, they found it pleasant to play with their material; to turn their single pillars into bundles of clustered shafts; to fill their windows with tracery, structural at first, but afterwards as free and fantastic as lacework. The result is often beautiful. The method gave the freest play to the artist's invention, but it had its dangers, and they are exemplified at York. There the designer has evidently regarded his west front as a large space of wall to be played with, to be decorated much as if it were a piece of embroidery, and, in his anxiety to decorate it richly, he has lost his sense of unity and proportion. He has forgotten to use his ornament merely to emphasise the main lines of the structure. Where this is done, where the ornament is massed on the porches, on the windows, and on the lines dividing the storeys, the rest of the façade may be left alone. The bare spaces of masonry only serve to give relief to the decoration. But at York the main lines are so neglected, they offer so little opportunity for decoration, that the designer was afraid to leave his walls plain, lest the whole should appear lean and cold. He has, therefore, spun his tracery and panelling over the whole surface. Nowhere can the eye rest on a plain piece of wall; everywhere it is fidgeted by monotonous rows of niches and mouldings. In fact, it may be compared to an etching so full of unnecessary details that composition, balance of mass, and beauty of line are all smothered in them. And yet there is much to be said on the other side. The mere size—the height and width—go far to make the front impressive; and the detail, even now when so much of it has been restored, is usually beautiful. If it is not great architecture, it is at least living architecture, and as such infinitely superior to the most scholarly works of the Gothic revival. It is only when we compare it to the magnificent west fronts of Francethat we are inclined to regret that it has not rivalled them.